So here is an excerpt from Erica’s review (my apologies to Erica if I mess up some of the coding; I tried to get it all, but probably missed some):

So, when people who have read a million shoujo stories look at the genre, they tend to be very offhand about it. “Spunky young heroine who makes friends easily. Hot older guy she falls instantly in love with. Sullen and withdrawn guy her own age who she’s clearly going to end up with in the end. And of course a tragic past full of secrets. But again, shoujo is not where you go for originality.” (With apologies to Sean Gaffney who is not at all dismissive of these things – in fact, he embraces them with fervor.)

What this means is that anyone who does NOT read the genre, is likely to read all these jaded, dismissive accounts of the genre (often by people for whom the genre is not intended) and assume that that’s just the way it is. Couple this with the natural tendency of the “critic” to pretend their condescension is in some way objective and …yes, I’m going to say it…the unrelenting, aggressively clueless sexism of about 80% of the men involved in the comics industry and their less creative, but no less vociferous male counterparts in comics criticism…you get a world of upturned noses and sniffiness at anything created by, or worse – for – females.

Shoujo manga is aimed at girls. Young girls are casteless in the world of entertainment. Basically no one gives a crap about them. The color pink is regurgitated at them endlessly as if being 9 and female means that one is essentially color blind to any other color. And heaven forefend that anyone, anywhere, that makes books for girls should EVER be taken seriously.

Except Moto Hagio. Her work, we are told sniffily, is NOT LIKE those other, pinker, sparkle-pony-er kinds of shoujo. This is *serious art,* that we are meant to take very seriously. You can tell it’s serious and important, because male critics deign to look at it at all.

Humility, thy name is shoujo manga.

Moto Hagio is a woman who drew manga for girls. Young girls – girls of the age where it is perfectly acceptable for many people to eroticize them, but not to take them seriously as people, with their own requirements, fantasies and interests. She took them seriously. No surprise, as she had been one herself. As hard as this is to believe I also was a young girl once. Moto Hagio’s works talked *directly* to the young girl I had once been….

Shoujo manga is (often dismissively) summed up as stories of the heart. But shoujo manga is not just about romance – it is about emotional interplay. Where shounen heroes gain physical power, shoujo heroines gain emotional power. Shounen heroes beat their enemies to make them their friends – shoujo heroines love their enemies until they love them back. The characters here are lovable – which is a risk we take with these stories. We’re not sure that the heroine will be plucky or that everyone will love them back. But like most contemporary shoujo, A Drunken Dream contains stories of emotional interaction, and emotional growth that comes from communication.
Moto Hagio is, like all other “classic” writers, doomed to be over-thought by adults, when if you just handed the average teen her work without making an assignment out of it, it would probably go over well. (Better yet, make is slightly forbidden, like Death Note.) Fantagraphics has done a lovely job with the book and in doing so has all but guaranteed the separation of Moto Hagio from her *actual audience* – teen girls.

I think there’s a real risk, though, in over-analyzing this volume. Moto Hagio’s stories are, as I said at the beginning, masterful largely because she did not set out to be so. She wrote from the heart, stories that girls could understand, enjoy, identify with. She was the Stephanie Meyer of her time and only now, when we look back on a body of literature that spans decades, we see that it’s a little silly to dismiss it (or glorify it) because it’s shoujo manga. What A Drunken Dream offers is as much or as little as we want to see. If we stare too hard past the cute girl looking back at us in the mirror, we might in fact see the deathly crone behind her…but why would we want to do that? Can’t we just take the cute girl at face value? Isn’t she “important” enough on her own?

Moto Hagio is a woman, who draws stories for girls. She is a Master of her Craft. She is a groundbreaker in her field. None of these statements are contradictory.

A Drunken Dream is a must-read for any serious student of manga. While you’re getting a copy, buy one for a niece or friend – and don’t tell them it’s “important.” This way they’ll be free to just enjoy it, tropes and all.

I think there’s a real risk, though, in over-analyzing this volume. Moto Hagio’s stories are, as I said at the beginning, masterful largely because she did not set out to be so. She wrote from the heart, stories that girls could understand, enjoy, identify with. She was the Stephanie Meyer of her time….

I think this is really wrong. I’m no expert on Hagio, but from what I’ve gleaned she saw herself from the get-go as an artist. She was engaged with some relatively scandalous European literature, and was part of a self-conscious group of supportive artists. In addition, as JRB points out in the comments on Erica’s post, , many of the stories in Drunken Dream were not actually shojo, but were aimed at other demographics, including josei (older girls and women.) From comments JRB has made in the past, I believe that at least a couple of the stories were even presented in an explicitly “art” context (though I may be wrong there.)

Moreover, just reading Hagio’s stories you can see the ambition. It’s like reading Phillip K. Dick or even Ursula K. Le Guin. Yes, the stories are genre stories, but the author clearly sees those genre tropes as a way to talk to and think about the world of literature and art outside of genre. Stories like “Hanshin” and “Iguana Girl” focus on explosive themes using the resources of comics in dramatically non-genre ways. Even “Bianca,” which is genre as genre can be, is self-consciously about the power of art qua art.

Erica talks about the fact that Hagio appeals to those who feel different. And yes, that difference is about being a woman and being queer. But it’s also about being an artist. Denying Hagio that, insisting that she’s great because she was an unselfconscious genre writer writing for girls, seems to me almost tragic. Even after all this time, even despite her fame and influence, she can still only be acknowledged and admired if she jettisons her ambition and comes in under the cloak of intending to do what everybody else intended to do? I mean, Hagio Is not a girl. She’s an iguana. How much more clearly does she have to say it?

In that vein, I don’t understand how you do Hagio any favors by insisting that the reason that there’s little analysis of her work is that no analysis is needed, or that we need to read her as young girls if we’re to be true to her work. Great art doesn’t suffer from being over-thought. Indeed, thinking often is part of an emotional response; it’s inspired by a connection to the work and can add to and flesh out that connection. Writing about the story A Drunken Dream, for example, made me love that story more, not less.

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: I have no problem with people responding emotionally to the work (or responding in a non-overthought way, if that’s a preferable term). I’ve got no problem with people writing essays that reflect that approach — or with writing reviews which (like Erica’s essay) are explicitly intended to act as recommendations. I have nothing against that. My argument is simply that Hagio is a conscious and subtle artist, whose work is also usefully approached through “over-thinking”: that is, by attempting to work out her themes and ideas in a more systematic and aggressive way. Further, I think that if there was a critical community that wanted to approach her that way, there would also be more of an audience for her work.

Because, contra Erica, I do not believe that the “average teen” would instantly fall for these stories. Kids who are into shojo are into shojo as it is now. Hagio’s stories don’t look or read like the things they’re are reading. They don’t have lots of character development; they are weird and fractured, their art looks (from the perspective of a current shojo fan) wrong. And, further, they are filled ye to the brim not only with the celebration of difference that Erica points out, but also with a concomitant self-loathing. There is a large measure of misogyny in Hagio’s work — more than in the much-sneered at Twilight series, for example.

I think for this, and other reasons, A Drunken Dream does not translate to current day genre desires in the way that Erica would like it to. Folks like Erica who are “serious student[s] of manga” may want to read the book. But other people aren’t going to care, even if you don’t tell them it’s good for them. That’s why the book has topped some critics best-of lists but has excited very little other interest, as far as I can tell — not because it’s been marketed as “important”, but because at this point its primary interest is in fact that it is important. The genre market it was intended for has moved on.

Finally, I”d like to address the sexism charge. Again, here’s Erica:

Couple this with the natural tendency of the “critic” to pretend their condescension is in some way objective and …yes, I’m going to say it…the unrelenting, aggressively clueless sexism of about 80% of the men involved in the comics industry and their less creative, but no less vociferous male counterparts in comics criticism…you get a world of upturned noses and sniffiness at anything created by, or worse – for – females.

Again, I”m not sure that Erica is talking directly to me here…but I have seen at least a couple people in the twitterverse accuse me of sexism because of my take on the book. Erica’s arguments I think fits with that; her essay is in many ways a plea to be left alone; to let the work of girls be treated as girls work, created by women for the girls who are its primary readers. The suggestion is that it’s condescending and sexist to use different standards to look at the work — standards which are more usually used to speak about “art” rather than girls’ genre literature.

Erica sneers at folks who present those other standards as “objective”. (She does directly aim this criticism at me in this comment.) And I actually agree; those other standards aren’t objective; they’re simply a different way of looking at things. However, many, many works by women have been read using those standards, and not found wanting at all. To name just a handful of people who spring to mind off the top of my head, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alison Bechdel, Lynda Barry, Cindy Sherman, and on this blog recently Aline Kominsky-Crumb…all have been approached from a perspective that assumes they are conscious artists who should be judged as such.

One could argue, in fact, that approaching women artists that way is a feminist project. It presents the work of women as relevant not just to girls, but to the history of art. In fact, including women in this history changes the history of art and how we think about it. So, for example, Moto Hagio’s Hanshin uses the repetition native to comics to fracture identity and narrative in a way that is emphatically gendered. Reading it in the context of comics-as-art, therefore, changes how you see not just Hagio’s work, but the possibilities and traditions of comics as well. I’d argue it makes comics more feminist.

There are different feminisms, of course. Creating your own institutions and insisting on your own individual standards and reality is absolutely feminist too. It’s a way to strengthen one’s own community and oneself. It’s part of sisterhood, and is a longstanding and powerful response to sexism. The downside of this approach, however, is that it can lead to self-ghettoization and consequent irrelevance. You end up with an inability to talk to other people, which ultimately leaves you unable to affect other people or other conversations. That can end up perpetuating the problems you’re trying to address.

There are downsides to using or engaging with “art” standards as well. Those standards (despite real changes over the year) are still coded male in many ways; they can be used as an excuse to dismiss or denigrate work for reasons that connect to prejudice or misogyny. I don’t think my analysis of Hagio did those things…but one can never be too sure of oneself. So I’m grateful to those like Erica who challenge my preconceptions and ideas (whether she wrote her piece specifically with me in mind or not.)

12 Comments

You keep stating that the manga critical community sucks (I know you keep believing you aren’t saying this, but trust me, you are) and that if only we did it like you dudes in art-comix, we’d be able to sell Hagio.

There are three problems with this argument.

1. You have not accepted that you place a higher status on lit-crit approaches. It comes through though, and every time you say you don’t mind the touchy-feeling stuff, people are going to be more and more insulted, because you are not being honest about this.

2. You keep saying that Hagio is losing her audience because manga critics suck. You have provided absolutely ZERO PROOF OF THIS. If you want to make this argument, then you need to be looking at sales statistics, not just the number of essays about Hagio. Correlation, causation, is any of that ringing a bell? E.g., how do you know that Hagio isn’t selling? What would reaching her ideal audience look like? How would one be able to tell?

3. You keep stating that critical commentary would bring Hagio to the right sort of audience, as though lit-comix has actually managed this with their own essays. When have they done this, like, ever? I just got back from Borders. Is there a lit-comix section? Because if so, dude, I completely missed it. Don’t you think maybe y’all in the lit-comix world should be coming to the manga folks for advice on how to get comics into the hands of the people who want to read them? I mean, color me confused here, but I thought the pink hordes of manga readers were doing a teensy bit better job of selling their product than the art comics. But hey. What do I know. Maybe there was a big lit-crit essay that fired the burning passion for lit-comics in a thousand hearts. If so, I guess I missed it. What essays did this? When? What figures increased, by how much, where? How was this causation teased out? If critical essays worked as ads, I suspect a bunch of folks in NY would like to know. I mean, have you even compared the Amazon sales figures before and after a roundtable? Are you just…assuming here? Or what?

I’m pointing out that his argument lacks all correlation and support. He’s the one who is stating that it isn’t reaching its audience, but he has shown absolutely no evidence for his statements and his entire thesis is based on that assumption. I’m asking for that evidence. I’m not making a counter-argument that Hagio is selling like hotcakes. I’m making the argument that Noah’s argument is poorly argued and insufficiently supported.

“I think for this, and other reasons, A Drunken Dream does not translate to current day genre desires in the way that Erica would like it to. Folks like Erica who are “serious student[s] of manga” may want to read the book. But other people aren’t going to care, even if you don’t tell them it’s good for them. That’s why the book has topped some critics best-of lists but has excited very little other interest, as far as I can tell — not because it’s been marketed as “important”, but because at this point its primary interest is in fact that it is important. The genre market it was intended for has moved on.”

Well, it’s indicative that ‘Drunken Dream’ is published by Fantagraphics, a small niche publisher; but put it to the test– ask a young girl or woman to what extent Hagio appeals?

Are Hagio’s other, series works available in American mass-market editions? (This is a genuine, not a rhetorical, question; if yes, it would go some way towards invalidating Noah’s assertion.)

BTW, I’m a bit bemused by Noah being pilloried for saying that Hagio is NOT a commercial hack!

Alex, it has been his thesis all along. The title of his original post was “Criticizing the Critics”. And it includes lots of gems, like “I do think that, compared to art comix, there is little writing from within the manga community that is firmly committed to criticism as opposed to review.”

This, from someone who I doubt even knows what Dreamwidth is or why that would matter, who is an avowed non-Twitter user, and who does not read much manga criticism.

His conclusion is, “I do believe, though, that as long as those interests are what they are, it’s going to be difficult to find an audience for something like “A Drunken Dream,” which, despite its genre links, doesn’t fit easily into current marketing demographics, and which, therefore, has to live or die as art.”

He summarized it on the links page by saying, “I argued that the manga blogosphere has done a poor job in reviewing Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream.”

And so on. This is not an argument that I began. Noah decided to say that the manga blogosphere is doing a poor job. His argument rests on an assumption that he has not proven or even provided evidence for, and I find the way he keeps bringing it up to say, “But no really, I was right, the manga blogosphere really do a poor job” to be very irritating.

Alex, I think it’s reasonable and even valuable to raise the issue of sexism. Creators and genres do get dismissed for gender reasons. And, you know, I’m not above some name-calling myself. I don’t think I’ve been hard-done by in this discussion.

VM.

1.I certainly prefer reading and thinking about more over-thought approaches. I recognize that other approaches may work better for other people — they even work better for me sometimes —, and, as I keep saying, that’s fine with me.

If you want to believe it isn’t fine with me, I don’t exactly know what I can do about that. It’s not like I’m generally especially reticent about lambasting approaches I dislike, I don’t think. I mean, I’ve made some effort to give people who write that kind of criticism space on this blog. And I’ve said, over and over, that I think that approach is valid. I’ve said that because I think it is! I argued in this piece that it’s a worthwhile feminist position. I argued in comments on the last piece that I’d learned things from it about criticism and about my own writing.

I mean, there’s nothing in this essay that says that manga critics suck. I thought Erica’s essay was interesting and provocative! And, for that matter, Erica was much more aggressive in her essay about rejecting the kind of criticism I prefer than I have ever been in dismissing the kind of criticism she prefers.

I do think that there are advantages to other approaches. I think the manga community doesn’t explore those approaches as much as it might. I think these are valid points — not necessarily absolutely true or inarguable, but worth raising and discussing.

And, in fact, much of the reaction (including Erica’s!) has essentially agreed with me on my initial analytical point, which was that manga criticism tends to avoid the kind of over-thinking that I find valuable. The debate then moves to explaining why over-thinking is bad (a point I’ve tried to dispute in this post) or else to attacking my tone (which is what you’re doing here.) Since you’ve basically said that anything I say will just make things worse, it’s not really clear what I can do about that. (Except stop talking about it, I guess…which I’m sure I’ll do at some point.)

2-3. Two different questions here. First, there seems to be a general consensus that the Hagio book hasn’t done all that great. David’s said so. Erica’s essay pretty much says so. I don’t have access to sales figures, but my sense has been that there hasn’t been a ton of interest. Folks with more ties than I have to the manga community appear to agree.

You’re certainly right, though, that sales figures would make things somewhat more concrete. It wouldn’t necessarily invalidate my argument either way, though — especially the point I make here. That point being that overthought comics criticism needs Hagio as much as or more than the other way round.

Second, I’ve never said that more or different criticism would cause there to be more of an audience for Hagio’s work. I’ve been very careful not to say that, in fact, because I don’t believe it would. What I’ve said (and if you’ll read back over what I’ve written, you’ll see this) is that *if* there were a different kind of critical interest, *there would also be* more of an audience. The first would not be the cause of the second. They’d both (I think) be the result of different groups of people being interested in the work in a different way.

Shojo’s pulp genre work, and sells like pulp genre work. Lit comics aim for a different kind of genre audience, one that’s innately smaller. Within that market, though, they do okay. Folks like Dan Clowes and Alison Bechdel and Art Spiegelman sell in respectable numbers. Hagio falls betwixt and between; she doesn’t really fit the genre tropes, but there’s not enough of an audience willing to see her as highbrower to make that a useful demographic either. (Or at least that’s my sense of things.)

Thanks for the sales numbers, VM. Maybe the book is doing better than I thought? I’m not really sure what good numbers would be precisely though….

“This, from someone who I doubt even knows what Dreamwidth is or why that would matter,”

I know what it is. You’ve explained why it would matter.

As I said above, many of the folks who have commented have basically agreed with me that the kind of criticism I’m talking about is not something that interests manga critics. You and Kate were exceptions to some degree…though Kate didn’t really try to argue the point, and you’re argument (about the value of collaborative criticism within often closed communities) doesn’t actually contradict my sense of things.

Again (and at the risk of making you angrier) I think the collaborative criticism you talked about sounds worthwhile and interesting. It’s obviously inward-turned, though, and it sounds like there are various factors (the desire to include everyone in the discussion; concerns about spoilers; etc.) which militate against the kind of over-thinking that Erica criticizes.

Would you disagree with that? Do you think over-thinking is central to a lot of manga criticism? And if so, do you disagree with the thrust of Erica’s argument?

Oh…and as I said, I do think that Hagio reviews in the mangasphere have been weak, for reasons that have to do with the book’s uncomfortableness in a genre setting. I thought Erica’s take was more sensitive than some have been. Her readings were relatively straightforward…but she went to some pains to explain why she thought that kind of reading was the most valuable one. Her essay is really critically engaged and polemical in a lot of ways; so in some sense it ends up being overthought in the sense that she argues against (which is part of the reason it appealed to me probably!)

Vom, do you disagree in general with the notion that using lit-critical standards to read women artists is part of a feminist project, and/or agree with Erica contra Noah that this work isn’t well served by overthinking? Or do you just disagree with Noah’s particular bringing-together of his preference for “overthinking” with his challenge to manga criticism in general and to Hagio’s reception among lit-minded folks in particular?

Also, for someone who has read Erica’s full piece, is the “deathly crone” a reference to an earlier discussion — that is, is it clear from the article why she’s so sure there’s a “deathly crone” behind the little girl? Out of context like this, the implication is that “overthinking” always turns up something ugly, which just isn’t true…

I’m just concerned about the implication from the end of that paragraph — which may be entirely unintended and I’m sure I’m being oversensitive to it! — that the problem here is somehow inherent to the “overthinking” method, rather than some emergent feature of particular situation. That deserves, ahem, some more thought.

It’s perfectly valid to say that a given book/story/whatever doesn’t benefit from lit critical readings (or that it does), and it’s also absolutely valid to point out the other things the book has to offer and to clarify what kinds of readings and perspectives open it up to readers.

But I remember your initial point being that when you use the lit critical approach, you see different things from when you don’t use it, and that those things would be interesting to audiences who currently aren’t seeing them because they’re discouraged, by the existing criticism, from looking for them in Hagio. That discouragement anecdotally happens: I’m extremely unlikely to read a book that a critic has said might be ruined by overthinking it, because I overthink pretty automatically, and there’s no point in setting myself up for a miserable experience.

Plus there’s insight to be gained from mismatches between critical methods and works, and you lose the opportunity for that insight if you just replace a preference for literary criticism with a preference for some other kind of criticism. Seems like we want as many critical approaches as possible represented for all books, so that no matter what any given audience group is interested in, they can get a fair sense of whether and how any given work speaks to their interests.